


ventilated box logbook

by transversely



Category: 7 Seeds
Genre: Gen, Team Summer A ensemble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 10:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: At six, they get a speech about how the future will be like an endless exercise in seven-person belaying, something something, the importance of teamwork will metastasize dreadfully, dormitories should segregate two-to-a-room for maximum discomfort, and although she keeps her eyes shut and a book over her head for the entire lecture, Nijiko ends up with a roommate anyway.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aegistheia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aegistheia/gifts).



> dear aegistheia, always a massive delight to get to write in this fandom! thank you for giving me the chance, and thank you for your excellent taste in minor characters.
> 
> this fic contains canon-typical but non-graphic discussions of childhood trauma, survivor's guilt, and sexual assault, per the tone and subject matter of Summer A's backstory. it also contains mentions of background Nijiko/Ran and past Nijiko/Ryo. many thanks to pyrophane, for scene help, for devoting so much time to embroidering the team's backstory around the edges with me, and for many helpful ideas regarding Ayu's characterization. 
> 
> happy Yuletide, and enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

**1.**

 

 

 

 

 

At six, they get a speech about how the future will be like an endless exercise in seven-person belaying, something something, the importance of teamwork will metastasize dreadfully, dormitories should segregate two-to-a-room for maximum discomfort, and although she keeps her eyes shut and a book over her head for the entire lecture, Nijiko ends up with a roommate anyway. 

"Over there is  _my_ half of the window, and this is  _my_ half of the floor, but we have an odd number of floorboards, so I've generously given you one extra if you need it for calisthenics, you  _are_ a gangler, aren't you? Stay on your side--this is  _my_ Nalgene, I fill it nine times per day, so don't think I don't notice the high-water mark! This is  _my_ half of the blinds, you can touch them if I'm in the room, so I can watch--"

"You want to watch me touch the blinds?"

"Of course not," says Ayu, and flings one braid over her shoulder so emphatically it wraps back around her throat. "I want to watch if you're touching  _my_ blinds. I think it's really very reasonable." 

Nijiko kicks their rug over and peers at the ground. "I have to sweep an extra floorboard?"

Ayu bristles at the jacket thrown on the bed and comes over to tie it around Nijiko's waist. She double-knots it, just to create more work. Up close she's tinier than Nijiko, but all the parts of her are symmetrically, meticulously made, like a perfectly miniaturized adult. Looking at her makes Nijiko think of getting up in the morning and plaiting long slippery hair and filling a Nalgene nine times a day and then doing that again, doing all of that again, for hundreds of days. Thousands.

Everything about Ayu is too much work.

"Very reasonable!" Ayu shouts.

Ayu gets up an hour before Wagner for calisthenics and stays up an hour after Dvorak to dry her hair, which she pulls through her fingers to monitor nutrition. She shouts at Nijiko to check hers too, to which Nijiko notes that her nutrition is fine and she is already four inches taller than Ayu, upon which Ayu doesn't speak to her for three days and pushes her chair vindictively over the extra floorboard. Ayu checks her teeth too, and keeps her own plaque samples and fingernail clippings in a macabre little multi-compartment pillbox on the windowsill, next to her strawberry runners she once cried over for four straight hours when Nijiko mistook them for herbs and trimmed them to take to dining hall duty. She has three picture books she has won as prizes, which she keeps on her half of the shared shelf and reads in an order every day, turning the pages with militant, unsmiling focus. She has a wadded up hand towel secured into a teru-teru-bozu which she places on her pillow, spreading her braids carefully on her other side. 

"That's because I plan to have offspring in the future," she explains, the third time Nijiko has attempted to throw it out during laundry. "I call it Civilian to remember it's helpless. Because it seems like you could easily crush offspring in your sleep. We won't have infant care classes until we're--fifteen, or something, I need to train myself to be aware of another person."

Nijiko is sitting at her side of the table, shading in capillary action damage in her hydraulics coloring book with a blue crayon, but the idea of this is so horrible she puts her head down on her arms and pretends to be asleep.

"I know you're not asleep, Nijiko! Don't you plan to have offspring?"

"No." Ayu hugs her pillow in a methodical throttle, eyes huge. Her face is quite flexible because of all the time she spends reacting disapprovingly to things, something Nijiko keeps forgetting to tell her isn't factored into rankings no matter how much opening and closing of his mouth Ango does in any given week. "They drink from inside you. That's...like..." Nijiko studies her coloring book for a moment, then holds it up: blue slashes spreading cancerously across the turrets of a brick dam.

"How repulsive!" screams Ayu, and falls backward onto her bed. "I plan to research this! Your limbs would become destabilized?"

"Probably."

"Surely  _not_."

Nijiko puts her crayon down. "Have you ever seen a so-called parent?" Ayu waves her hand dismissively. "They're not real. Those offspring probably tore them to pieces. That's how capillary action works."

"That is  _not_ how it works!"

They go to the bathroom and fetch a paper towel and Nijiko makes Ayu hold the top while she gets the rest of it wet. Ayu watches it disintegrate with an expression of purest rage. "That's horrible!"

"I told you. It's disgusting."

"Civilians are so disturbing..." Ayu breathes.

"I know." She considers. "Sometimes I just think about them and feel tired."

" _Nijiko_ , you  _always_  feel tired."

"...haha."

Ayu's moue upends into a dubious-looking smile. "Why did--I was amusing? I was amusing!" Her chest puffs like a weather balloon; she nearly tips herself over with pride.

They stare at each other. Momentarily, their quiet room had sounded like the rest of the rooms down the corridor, full of bubbling conversation. Nijiko turns her face away, putting her fist with the crayon in it in front of her mouth. Ayu realizes she's ogling, darkens, and flops down on her bed.  

"Well, anyway," she says, pillow over her face, "offspring can probably be taught not to be fools. And they'll probably look like you, so the probability is low that they'll hate you for--that they'll hate you."

Ayu rereads books because she wants to remember winning and grows strawberries she won't share but will show you how to grow, if you ask, which Nijiko never has; she's the brightest person Nijiko knows but it has never occurred to her, somehow, that Ayu knows why no one else would have roomed with her.

She executes a few prevaricating slashes with the crayon. There's a blaring sunshine glare on her page; it's always sunny here, weather that compells people to congregate outside on the grassy lawn. In their room, a thicket of familiar, particular shadows--the legs of their two beds and chairs and desks--crosshatches close around them like the teeth of a comb.

She feels uncomfortable here, she decides. It's too hard being surrounded by someone else's things. Ayu is looking at her the way she looks at her hair between her fingers, gaze brittled with hope, and for the first time Nijiko thinks: stay on your side. 

"Not everybody hates you," she says, reaching for a real fact. "Some people also don't notice." 

When they're in bed, Ayu says, "If you  _do_ have offspring...you won't be prepared, and that would be unfortunate, since you are--quite knowledgeable. I've been watching. You're like me, you know. People are fools but they'll want to know you, they just don't know it yet."

The pure, bald want in her voice--Nijiko turns onto her side, facing the cool watered blue of her wall, and thinks of water flowing away, finding a way to escape. Water isn't constrained by four walls and what you need of it; it does what its nature compels, and the world fits itself to that. She holds very still, and waits for the parts of her to dissolve into water. 

"You can practice. You can use Civilian." 

A patter of feet, then Ayu sets the hand towel on Nijiko's desk and steps back, back to her side of the room. 

"I don't want to," Nijiko says. "I see you holding it, I’m not...I've got everything I need." 

She hears Ayu's breath catch, and then a quick scuttle back across the evenly-distributed floorboards. It seems disproportionate. All there are here are things Ayu already has, textbooks, clean dusted furniture, jersey shirts left on the windowsill to grow warm for morning runs. Nijiko is a good roommate, and there is nothing that requires explanation on her side of the room. 

In the morning, the towel is still on her desk. Ayu leaves it there, as if unwilling to acknowledge that she ever handed it over in the first place. It stays there while Nijiko does her homework; she spritzes around it when she cleans. Two weeks later, when the gaggle of girls that circles around Ayu comes in to take her strawberries, neither of them are in but it makes an easy target, anomalous on Nijiko's bare-bones side of the room, and they find it a few hours later shredded and confettied all over their floor. She supposes Ayu might mention it, but then there are night camping exams, flashlights and vinyl in the woods for three days, and the following weekend Ayu packs a knapsack and heads to her cot at the agricultural terrace for harvest season. They go into the thick of finals for the summer session, and by the next month, Ayu has ranked first for the first time, and moves to her own single on the top floor. For the next few years, Nijiko is never able to break the habit of looking up to her window as she trudges back from the river in her wellingtons, noting the time of night by whether Ayu's hair is still hanging straight or whether she's already bound up that heavy, lengthening burden, one fewer day ahead of her, one fewer silent afternoon, until she might wake up on her side of the future. 

 

 

 

 

 

**2.**

 

 

 

 

 

Not that it plays well at her yearly evaluations, but Nijiko's social life is mostly a function of Ryo's hyperactive thyroid gland, which gets him through puberty in the manner of a paperclip being erratically unbent and around the age of fourteen goes berserk and starts radiating nuclear quantities of heat. Adolescence is a joke. One moment she's head-height, able to hang a tent ridge tree to tree with him to clothesline Ango in one go, the next she's shivering in the predawn river with the other girls in the water class and their instructors are saying, "Some women's extremities will start to develop a lower body temperature at this age--hat and gloves next time, Nijiko," and Ryo is glaring at her as though she hasn't been picking the nasty long hairs he sheds everywhere off their shared library carrel since they could read. 

"You owe me a hat," he mutters, covering the crown of her head with a hand the size of a garbage can lid. She sideswipes with her ankle and knocks him on his ass in the water. But he has a foot on her and ergonomically friendly collarbones, so she leaves a few changes of tracksuit and a hydroponics textbook in his first-rankers’ single and doesn’t waste any more thought on it.

He does, which is just typical.

"You're  _growing_ , so-called," he’s explaining, a few months into the arrangement, "been thinking about this thing with your extremities--no, not--quit sneering at me." She sneers at him. "You think we should move the beds together?" 

All the rooms have regulation furniture she's done dozens of times in construction seminar, desks with refrigerated compartments, bunsen burner attachments, two beds to every single so you can stack them into bunks or modify one to a couch. She and Ryo spend hours sitting on theirs at either end of the room, ignoring each other peacefully until Dvorak, when he stretches his arm out with inquisitive hauteur, she heads over, and they continue to ignore each other until she falls asleep, usually to his interchangeable monotone litanies about their sheeple classmates minus Koruri, who just hangs  _around_  with sheeple, but can still be redeemed by the patience of someone who would nurture her independent spirit and...

Civilians have double beds in assorted magazines. Nijiko's inductive logic scores are the best they've ever been. 

"Ah," she shrugs. "You're mean we're in love."

"It's not like I thought about it," he says in the tone that indicates he has spent at least three weeks thinking about it and concocted a few overwrought symbolic hypotheses she doesn't care enough to disprove. "But who'd be in love if not us...? We're like... _the_ Team Summer  _of_ Team Summer." 

She loses interest in using his ruler to clean her nails and goes for his favorite pen instead; he eyes this with what she supposes is transportive adoration. 

"Fine," she says. "We'll be in love. I don't have to do anything like--talk to you, or something?"

"Of course not. We're in love."

"Wow."

"I know, right." He studies his split ends modestly. "It ruins people's lives, you know. Some people  _die._ Some people secrete  _fluid_."

"Nice."

"We could distill that, right. I bet it's awesome."

"Like ethylene glycol, metabolizing...into oxalic acid..."

"Damn..."

They survey the room, now bathed in the peachy glow only peaceable thoughts of weaponized antifreeze can induce. 

"Sure, let's move the beds," Nijiko decides. 

She doesn't share Ryo's ease with her but understands the sentiment: some less reliable iteration of what she feels when she tucks her pencil behind her ear and gives her waterwheels a cautious push, and with a groan of pistons they spin and dredge up the deep water under fast-moving topcurrents, all iron on the tongue. Koruri waits for weather, Ryo racks up discipline chamber notations, Ayu pretends she isn't watching people taste her zucchinis in the dining hall but Nijiko prefers engineering because her job ends where others' needs begin. The only assurance she needs that something is finished is that it can function without her. 

The closest she gets to that sense--the closest she comes to feeling finished herself, functional and private--is to move his desk away from the picture window and sit on the sill with her cheek against the warm, mineral-flecked glass. It's old construction, substantial slabs of plate melting to the thickness of fingers at the join of their frames. She doesn't know how to build it: the surest possible indication that someone else is doing the work. She lets the glass support her weight the way his disembodied arm does except better, high above the dollhouse panorama of the waterwheels, the river dam, the bridge the soil class is building like the silver line of a staple across the creek between the two banks. This far, other students are only speckled dots, minute visual errors in the corona of her eye. If she needs them, there they are, but she doesn't need to be near them. Enough to know they're there, exempted from the need to notice them any more closely.  

She does come to regret the bed decision because then the Experiment happens, about a year later, the both of them stressed enough during finals that testing the veracity of the health center’s claims about fluid secretion sounds like a more convenient distraction than going all the way down to the dining hall and harassing Mayu to make them the good protein shakes. By the time they've decided it’s not worth and progressed to passive-aggressively looking up venereal diseases in their reproduction textbook, she's so annoyed by the entire  _idea_  of her "vagina," the tasteless  _obviousness_ of its design, that she ends up locking herself into the health center overnight when she goes to get a cream, sulking in a cot and tense with a sour, queasy dissatisfaction she's having trouble attributing to anything in particular.

Around two a.m., she's eating stolen granola out of a flashlight shell and reading about industrial accidents when someone starts banging on the door for so long she gets up, prepared to throw her book at Ryo again. But it's only Ayu, who scowls when she sees Nijiko and pushes past her into the building. She has one braid undone, a pullover over her sleeping clothes.  

"Nobody's here," Nijiko says. "Come back in the morning."

Ayu is ignoring her, busy at the metal cabinet where the teachers keep supplies for students who are sexually active. Technically you're supposed to sign them out, not that Ryo did for the bag of awful sponge things he took out for her which she's planning never to look at again. But whatever Ayu has doesn't look like any of the things Nijiko took, or anyone else took. She has a small, pressurized metal canister which she refills with something from a glass bottle. When she catches Nijiko looking, she says, "Cover your eyes."

She tests the canister's atomizer in the direction of the window, her own eyes covered with her sleeve, arm held far out as though she's aiming at someone. She puts it into the pocket of her pullover.

"Oh," Nijiko says, understanding dawning slowly. "You don't want it either."  

Ayu freezes. Then she whirls, and glares. When she was a child, she looked like an adult, and now that she is nearly grown, she looks too young for her age. Ayu is always caught out out of time. 

“Do you also need…“

“No. We didn’t like it. We stopped.”

“Oh.” She sets the canister on the ledge of an examination table and goes to wash her hands. She runs the water for a long time.

"Don't tell anyone," she says eventually, looking Nijiko dead in the eye.

"I don't talk to anyone."

"Don't tell Mayu."

"I don't talk to Mayu."

"Mayu would never talk to you," Ayu says. "She doesn't know anything about you. She thinks she knows everything, but she's scared of you. You're alone. You're hiding here--in the middle of the night--because you're absolutely alone. You don't have anyone to take care of you."

“You’re taking care of yourself,” says Nijiko. “Why do you feel bad about that?”

She knows, with the sense that tells the best of them they've misaimed at shooting practice or with a pipette or syringe or grappling, that what she said isn't quite correct. But she doesn't know how to fix it. She and Ayu are both in the health center in the middle of the night, avoiding something as far as the civilians are concerned is supposed to be some kind of pinnacle of human experience, and something has made Ayu feel _ashamed_ of what she does to survive. It genuinely baffles her. She could tell her what she knows about water, that you're  _never_ alone and will still never be taken care of, but you will always be dependent on something, because water is something to be come upon. You can't make it, you can't steal it if it doesn't exist. With luck, you find it. That's all that stands between your survival and anything else: dumb luck.

In the absence of something that will do it for you, you protect yourself in the interim. You are your luck, without shame. They’ve been raised this way. It’s rare that she feels any admiration for it, or for her classmates.

For the first time, she thinks: if there is a future. We might make it.

She takes another handful of granola and eats it, slowly. The idea of the future takes on dimensions and direction, like a blueprint. This is enough, it’s glass and the line of the river, herself folded into warm parameters of space, supported. It’s the most she’s ever allowed herself of optimism and it dismays her, that she can't find any way to relay this to Ayu. She still doesn't know if it's correct. But she thinks this might be an idea that will let them survive.  

"I don’t feel bad,” Ayu says, as if she’s never thought of it that way before.

Before she leaves, she cracks the blinds, much to Nijiko’s irritation.

“Let the moon in,” she says, flashes her a thin half-smile, and is gone.

When she gets back to the room in the morning, Ryo is sitting on the back of his chair as usual, teetering, turning a Japanese playing card over in his fingers.

"There's been an accident," he says, and tosses the card to her. "I've got our things. What do you think?" 

As he goes past her he runs a hand over her head casually, the locks of her hair falling through his fingers, the growing parts of herself menially perceived, managed, cared for, on the precondition only that she allows someone else into her space. They might make it. There is only a little unease, and this she smoothes under the weight of adrenaline, exposed wiring buried under concrete.  

The corner of her mouth slides up. She says, "Feeling lucky."

 

 

 

 

 

 **3.**  

 

 

 

 

 

"Tri--tri--tri--tri--triangular sequence," says Ban. "From...fifteen."

"Fifteen. Twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-six--"

"G-good."

"My turn? The bones of..." she looks at her hand, then holds it up. "I don't remember the word just now."

"Proximally, scaphoid, lunate, triquetral...p-p-pisiform...distally..." He studies his right hand for long moments, massaging his metacarpals with the fingers of his left. "Excuse me," he says abruptly, "I think I'm going to be sick. Remind me where I was," and levers himself out of the capsule for the lavatory.

"Can you bring me some water?" He doesn't look back.

Nijiko tips the crown of her head against the padded wall. She listens to the soft hisses of formaldehyde pumped pneumatically through the lower chamber of their two-capsule cluster.

Ryo is seated in the cluster adjacent, head lolling to one side. The large pale spiders of his hands at rest in his lap. His hair falls limply over the edge of her capsule. She flicks it back towards him and hears it splash. This is her capsule. What does he want to leave things in it for?

He left once already. It's all right; she's let her body temperature creep a little lower than she should, lower than she ever voluntarily will again, and soon she'll forget he was ever there. 

("If that was your test," she'd said, when she fetched him on the boat, "what do you think was mine?" 

He'd looked at her with dead, round eyes like beetles. 

"You?" he'd said blankly, "I don't think you need a...")

Not for her, to be missed.

She splashes with her palms in the shallow nitrogenated preservation fluid. The tops of her thighs emerge like bad eggs. She doesn't recognize them at all.

She likes her capsule, she decides. If she'd been in a capsule for the test, that would have been optimal: it's an adequate functional design for space, and nobody would think of trying to climb into it with you, or asking you for anything from it. No one would  _die_  in front of you, so inconsiderately, before you could explain: you don't share until you're finished knowing what you need and what you have.

Why would you invite someone to share a room you built for one?

She knows this because she is now the best engineer in the water class. It's nice to know things for certain!

In the capsule, you and everyone else can see you don't have anything. Nijiko thinks that for the first time in her life, she might be happy in a way others can recognize. Here she is in a beautiful touchless void, just two waxy calipers in her ears. She'd love to take a look. It wouldn't be a bad thing if they stayed in the capsules in the future, and them perhaps if they stayed a little longer while they decided what to do, and then if they couldn't, if they continued to stay there, body temperature regulated for them, nourished, hydrated, if they stayed there for another year, or two, or twenty--

A serene, obliterative peace licks away cleanly at the insides of her. If you want to stay alive. If that's what you really want to do. You shouldn't move, if you've found a place that has whatever you need. If they lived in a world where the test could happen, then it stands to reason that she and her classmates are now in the safest place there will ever be, the first in their lives when they know exactly what will happen to them. 

Ban returns, smelling of antibacterial soap, and she smiles at him. She wants to tell him she was right: no one is that lucky. 

When he gives her the paper cup of water he seizes her hand and checks her pulse on the inside of her wrist. She takes it back and rubs it on the capsule's rubber lining. 

"Do you think we'll get to keep them where we're going?" she says. "The capsules."

"I--in the future--shouldn't we?"

"If it's the future. If that's real. I don't care what happens there, but I need to keep this. Ask me another mathematical sequence."

"Nijiko...are you well? Lean forward. I need to check your forehead."

"All right. Don't come inside, though."

"I-I won't."

"Don't come inside. I don't have anything for you."

"I won't."

"I'm not helpful. I'm not lucky. Don't come inside."

Since he understands, she lets him do it. Ayu, round-cheeked, clinging to her hand towel, Ryo's curious, frowning face in the morning before he wrenched it to his normal blank expression, both of their untempered, unmet curiosity, as though there was so much more of Nijiko yet to be discovered--no room for anyone in this capsule. Only Ban's hand, deferentially extended to touch her forehead; his voice, from a great distance: "You're fine. You're fine. You're fine--" repeated again and again, almost begging. He's still repeating it seven minutes later, when the plexiglass partition goes up dividing the capsule room in two, finally shielding Ango, Gengoro, Koruri, and Ayu from view.

Ayu is laughing hysterically when she goes under, shrieking I'm ready, I'm ready over and over between whoops. She remembers out of nowhere how Ayu used to have a minute, private smile when she took a great risk and won a game; it was something sweet about her, how quiet she was in delight of her little victories. You couldn't see it if you sat next to her in class, or met her out on the fields. You had to be closer. 

The laughter is guillotined short. Nijiko levels her legs out, stretching as far as they'll go into the capsule.

A second ago she was very happy. Where did it go?

She-- 

"Steady," says Ban, "adrenaline will give you uneasy dreams, Nijiko. Let's do a static stretch, starting with deltoids. One, two, three..."

She knows the truth now: there's no reason for anyone to take a chance on this. Her body is water, stilled enough for her to see the reflection of her own spirit; fires still burning in six capsules around her, and here is her role. Water dulls heat because water is nothing.

"...twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, please don't be dead," Ban is mumbling, "when we wake up--please, please, please, please don't be dead--"

She takes off her shirt. From within the glass box of her youth she saw it as only an interminable waiting, but now she beholds as though from Ryo's picture window a sunlit expanse of time, space, water she'll never get back, as though that place was somewhere that had fit her well, as though that life had been made to her specifications. She understands that this is what she will now remember as her childhood. 

She dulls it all to a sheen of dust and wipes it blank. She is empty ground to be built on, nothing more left to be taken, to call her own.

It's with a glacial, anaesthetic calm that she accepts her sedative and lies back in her capsule. Ryo went into artificial REM a moment before; she thought she could feel his hand slipping from the crown of her head as quietly as death. When her ears touch the water, she hears his heartbeat on one side, Ban's on the other, amplified and turned enveloping and primal through the velvety brine. The sound is as familiar to her as her own and then there is only her own: her heart standing alone before the long sleep.

A deep quiet, struck like a bass note, permeates to the bones of her. Her teachers were right. There was never anything more to discover or worth caring for. This is who she is, finished. When she opens her eyes, the future will be upon her, and that will be the end of the time of her life when she genuinely believed, she now realizes, that if you kept your wants limited, it would someday be possible to find everything you needed. People found her, after all. And that was the end of their luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 **4.**  

 

 

 

 

 

A month into the future, they all decide simultaneously, as though they’ve had a meeting about it, to start complimenting Nijiko on the treehouse. She didn’t ask them to or give any indication that she thought it might be less than sufficient for anyone’s needs. But in the morning, Ban tells her that he likes the benches. Ango nods angrily and mutters something about the open-air plan. Ryo drones on and on about the height, the ladders and the suspension bridge and how well they hold up after the first rainstorm, which takes them all by surprise in its fury but leaves their settlement unscathed. The only thing it does, which Nijiko finds fixable, is tear a hole in the thatching of the room large enough to let in the moonlight.

The second day after this happens, Ayu begins to sleep under the bridge. 

Nothing is private anymore; privacy is death. They hold a meeting. They vote. Ban has the night shakes, Ango walks, Koruri cries, Gengoro isn't firm, and Ryo doesn't sleep, so it's Nijiko who ends up staying in the only untouched room of the treehouse with a deadbolt, which Ayu is prone to undoing against everyone's injunctions to stay inside, out of the reach of predators. Nijiko is instructed to draw the deadbolt and locks herself and Ayu in, then position herself in front of the door in case she wakes up. 

The room looks like what she'd seen in her fourth edition Shinohara textbook; so far so good. The sole modification she made, once she learned they'd have to keep Ayu under house arrest while the roof was fixed, was a curtain hung on the diagonal. Take the roof cross-section, and the sleeping space would look like the two triangular halves of the sandwiches she used to steal from Koruri to take to water training. 

She doesn't like sandwiches. She stretches out in front of the door and closes her eyes.  

"Are you on their side?" Ayu wants to know. She can't tell what she's doing through the curtain, nor does she know who she's talking about.

She gets the sense she doesn't really want to know.

"You're on their side."

"I'm not on anyone's side."

"You're lying."

She doesn't care enough to lie, and wants to tell her that, but it's--they're different people, the ones came out of the capsule with her. Different from the ones she grew up with, whom she'd thought at the end might make it. It's so  _unfair,_ she thinks then, to have them all change at the moment she needs them. 

She doesn't think she's changed. It's not clear what that might mean, here in the future.

"Koruri would care," Ayu is mumbling. "But she's Koruri. I know she wouldn't be on my side, but you're...as long as you..."

Nijiko turns over, facing the door. She tries her old trick of dissolving to water flowing under the cracks in the door, past Ryo and Ango's feet, down the steps to the treehouse and then where? Then where? "No. I didn't say I'm on your side. I said I'm not on  _anyone's_. I haven't done anything to make you think I am and I'm not going to. I'm nothing." 

"I don't believe you."

She turns back around, now alert to the purple contoured shadow. They had no right to give her this duty, and she shouldn't have taken it. She wants to know why her thatching came undone, if she's really that person who builds things that could be shaken loose under only a little rainfall. She doesn't ever want to talk to anyone again. But there's no way to ask for it, any more than there's any way for her to get out of here tonight. She shouldn't have to prove herself. 

She already did that. 

"I was the only one out of all of us who was right," she reminds Ayu. "Ever. In our lives. I'm the only person you should believe. Go to sleep." 

There's a weird coppery blush to the room that feels like fire, or the premonition of it. She gets up and checks the metal fittings that splice the unseen crossbeams to the tree beneath. When she turns back she sees the shadow of Ayu rolling up her bedroll and realizes it's not something structural: the feeling is between them, close and fever-warm as a sickness. 

"What do you want?" she asks. 

"I want to get out of here. I don't want to sleep in this room." 

"This room is finished, the other one isn't. It's the moonlight, isn't it? You don't want the moonlight."

There's a sound like a snap: Ayu has punched the curtain.

"Admit you're one of us," she says, voice gathering momentum. It wrongfoots Nijiko: she has never been shouted at. " _Admit it_. You failed, too, you _know_ you did--you know who you are now just like the rest of us, and you don't like it. That's why you're so jittery, right?"

" _This room is finished_. When the other one's done, it's going to look like this. Understand? This is as good as it's going to get. This is as good as it's _ever_ going to get. Go to sleep."

Her shadow is still for a long moment. The coppery feeling intensifies. The hair on the back of her neck prickles idly, though she didn't include a window. There's no breeze.

When the shadow leaps for the deadbolt she's ready; Ayu is stronger but she's calmer, and her body understands the distance to the door. She spreads her arms to make herself bigger and torques sharply to the right, catching her harmlessly across the jaw with her elbow. They grapple silently for a moment. Their bare feet stick to the floorboards. It's all right; the Institute was very careful about that, didn't teach them how to hurt one another. But they don't need a textbook for that anymore. They're good at that. They proved it.

She throws Ayu off easily. Her clammy skin, her haunted eyes, and as Nijiko skitters back with a  _whump_ into the blank cloth of the curtain, she feels something shudder under her feet: bolts creaking, beams straining, a terrible groan. Her stomach turns. She drops instantly. There's a tap on the bottom of the door; the others must have already followed suit. "Nijiko! Ayu!" calls Ryo from the other side. "Did you feel it? Are you all right?"

She ignores him and swipes her hand across her chin. There's a terrible feeling roiling inside her, queasy. Like the watery moonlight.

"Is this why you've all been saying things to me?" she asks. "About the treehouse."

" _I_ haven't said anything to you about the treehouse. Don't confuse me with anyone we know."

"You're right. You haven't." Ayu has gone quiet. "You don't think it's going to hold."

The curtain is the only thing she can count on. The slip of paper between the components of the chemical reaction. She wants to slam her hand against the wall and see what happens, if this thing she built will hold, but suddenly she's uncertain if it will, and uncertain of what she will say if it doesn't. 

"Answer me," she repeats.   

As she pulls the curtain she catches a glimpse of Ayu lying down again. Parts of her are shaking, her legs, her shoulders, her lower lip. The same parts of her are doing it too. Ayu told her once that plants communicate with one another when they're close together, some corollary of organic life she never made it her business to understand or do anything but avoid. The room she made is too small for this, but the curtain is there and through the slash of violet ink that she is on the cloth she can pretend she doesn't know her, doesn't feel anything like her. They've all of them been held up to the light, and now all they have to see of one another are shadows. It's all they need. They know who they are.  

Ayu can't do this, she realizes idly, and then, even more idly: neither can I. 

"I don't know," Ayu replies through the curtain, still as any shadow. Still as the dead. "But you don't either." 

They breathe carefully on ether side of the curtain, the little sandwich halves of the room and this is how it's going to be, she tells herself again, for the rest of her life. She will never make anything with enough power to wrest them all from the slow, crushing machinery of memory. She's finished with faith in what she can build and that is all there ever was to her, and once she reaches the bottom of that reservoir she'll be like Ayu, like any of them, wrecked in her broken pride when she'd always been pleased to hold herself apart.

She does a triangular sequence. She does a geometric sequence. She does a tangent sequence. About halfway through the next set her vision goes blank staring at her neatly slotted ceiling and she gets up, slips the deadbolt, and pushes past the brazier alcove into the main room, with its shards of open, dangerous moonlight lying on the floor.

Five pairs of eyes. She jerks a thumb behind her. 

"Go inside," she says, "Koruri, Ryo, anyone. I don't care. Anyone. I'm going to tire myself out."

Ryo is looking at her. She gazes pleasantly back. If he touches her, she thinks absently, she might rip out his throat. Or she might not. It's entirely possible she just wouldn't do anything, since that, after all, is what she knows conclusively she is good for. 

She's only operating on the basis of what she knows. She has to.

The future is impossible.

"Nijiko--" he starts.

"Put on your trainers," Koruri cuts him off, eyes full of tears. "Or you'll sprain something."

She gets her trainers laced with very calm fingers. She stretches properly because her useless body has learned in eighteen years to stretch properly and it will likely take her eighteen more years to learn anything else. She sets herself four trees for suicide lines and takes off at a clip that would sprain something, absolutely, if she hadn't been told to wear her trainers. The night air is thick as soup and her legs jacknifing through it meet enough resistance that they turn to lead in an instant.

She flies down the muggy pathway of the night. She feels queasy and invincible, the numbing adrenaline of limb loss or hysteria; she saw it on the mountain. Lines of crystalline stars stream past her face like pus. She's been shot, she thinks, then corrects herself: no, she hasn't. She knows what that feels like too.

She doubles up, head between her knees. She wants to throw up or collapse or something, submit herself to some bodily imposition and forget. But her body is the silent, rangy, dependable thing it's always been, like an elastic pulled onto the wrist, it's only attributes, she can't find the volition to animate it. It only waits for orders.

Out in the night of the future, the moonlight settles over everything in silky skeins, like snowdrifts, not enough to lose yourself and succumb to another long sleep, only enough to slip. She had enough sense to keep their rooms quartered apart with curtains and doors and sequester herself from the rest of the people she knows, but she understands Ayu, in that moment. There is no place that is safe, nothing you can build. Nowhere you can go to escape from yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 **5.**  

 

 

 

 

  

By the third month, the roof has been fixed, but she's still in the deadbolt room. 

Privacy is nothing, but the pretense at it is one of the few things left to them to stockpile or trade against one another.  The treehouse needs work. Ayu knows what she thinks about it. So she shifts her wakeup call to the bizarre hours at which Ayu gets up so the rest of the team doesn't see either of them, Ayu digging through her manure-raked trial plot with bare fingers to retrieve individual seeds, tears dripping steadily off her chin at attempt after futile attempt at germination. Ignoring this, Nijiko clips herself in and climbs to the base of the treehouse, studying the joins spliced to the fat tree trunk v-notch with the same langorous wide-handed grip her teachers used to use.

She can feel the structural instability, but it's something like Morse code tapped through the dormitory plumbing under a rainshower, the rattle of copper pipe interference obscuring the messages at the moment you caught them. She lacks the lexicon to name her mistakes.

They only have at most an hour and a half each morning. They get up quickly, listening to the rustle of one another picking up socks and buckles and carabiners, and Ayu waits behind the curtain until Nijiko goes out. Up in the rafters of the treehouse, she can see Ayu working in the plot, the sun moving like a blush up the back of her neck.

One day, Nijiko wakes up and her measurement set has been rained on from where she left it the last morning, rushing to climb down before the rest of the team woke up. She swears and heads over to it only to find the entire thing covered by a thin, wrinkled vinyl, the sort of thing used to cordon off greenhouse areas back when they were at school.

She glances back at Ayu, who looks at her levelly, as though she doesn't sleep in the same room. 

The vinyl she folds and makes into a triangle for sliding the rain off into a flask. The triangle, the flask, the water, and the aluminum canisters Ayu used to weight it down she slides back under the curtain. 

Ayu takes them, after a certain amount of time. She says, "I did you a service, so I would think something extra would be appropriate."

"I gave you the water I skimmed off."

"That would only be the efficient thing to do in the situation. What would you have to gain if I died of dehydration?" 

"Are you impugning your own ability to get hold of water without me?"

A shocked silence. Then, almost shyly: "I suppose I am."

She doesn't know what to say to that, so she doesn't.

Ayu says, "I think Koruri might run away."

Silence.

She senses Ayu doesn't expect her to do anything with the information, and that, too, is new, extending something towards her without trust, but also without blame that she can't be trusted. She comes up short, as always, against what it might mean to reciprocate, against something like that.

The responsibility of caring for one another swells against her ribcage in moments like this, ordinarily life-giving, the rhythm that propels them from day to day, but revealed from moment to moment as something that might malfunction at any second, as though they carry a sickness. Something she has no idea how to sustain. 

Eventually, after moments still at a loss, she says, "You would figure something out. Desalination, or probably drinking the blood of a rabbit."

"The blood of a rabbit? You're really certain I would try that?" She sounds immensely flattered and catches herself quickly. "Well, it's only to be expected. I am certainly a scourge to even the most fleet-footed mammals. I think it might even be beneficial for you to hear about my exploits at the agricultural terrace. When I was by myself."

"You didn't use cacti then?"

"How  _dare_ you! Under what circumstances would that  _not_ be the first item in my--"

The curtain stays. 

She dreamt of distant interdependence and Ayu dreamt of better people, the kind who wouldn't necessitate her visit to the health center in the middle of the night, and it's not clear whether either has been achieved. Right now, she doesn't care whether they are happy or not. The truth is simply that Ayu's intransigent rage is all that's endured of who they used to be when they still believed the future was somewhere worth going to, and whether she wants it or not, that's given her nights a sense of safety she has not, she knows, been able to reciprocate.  

She doesn't have time to dwell on it. By the fourth month, the civilians have arrived.  

 

 

 

 

 

**6.**

 

 

 

 

 

Nijiko learns three new things about civilians in short order. The first is that they're more practical than expected; they not only have parents, they also have siblings, a sort of prototype iteration that can supply spare parts--Ayu could learn a lot if still interested in her eldritch offspring endeavors. The second is that any time there's a rainbow, even a faint one, three-fourths of them will seek her out purposely to go "Nijiko-san! A rainbow! You know! Like, because your  _name_ is--" 

The third is that they have this thing called  _architect_. 

"Don't tell me--hey, Akio, ask Nijiko-san if they used the fourth edition Shinohara Desk Reference at her institute?" Ran mutters, shoving her arm into the dirt up to the elbow and feeling for the angle braces under Nijiko's extension foundation. It feels anatomical and a little--Nijiko crosses her legs. "That's sweet, it was in vogue when I was in cram school. They packed me the tenth edition desk reference for here. Ha! Tenth edition. I thought I'd write my own someday, be that TED talk darling, best architect in the  _world_ , and here I am leeching off this has-been. Does she think she can use it?" 

Nijiko thinks she can ask Ryo to steal it, memorize it in two days, and then waterproof and bury it for Ayu's future offspring so the civilians never see it again. "I adjust well to adverse working conditions on my own. Akio-san, does that bother Ran-san?" 

Ran's expression goes thunderous, mitigated by the fact that she's pretending she hasn't just lost two pens by sticking them into her bun and being unwilling to search for them again in front of Nijiko. One could call it murderous if one hadn't actually seen various murders turn out to be less interesting than might be expected. "Right, Akio, tell Nijiko-san, foundation schematic, excavation timeline, materials list--reconvene after two hundred years?"  

"Tell Ran-san to take as much time as she needs, if it's taxing."

"I will stab myself with this compass," Akio tells Ran, from his position lying flat on the floor of the extension, his abacus balanced on his forehead. "I cannot believe we were two degrees of LinkedIn away from each other, how old are you? Why are you conscripting me into the dumbest watercooler throwdown ever?" 

Ran clearly wants Nijiko to leave, so Nijiko sits down next to Akio, takes the long-dead batteries out of Ran's solar calculator, and starts reading the minute text. "I thought you enjoyed mediation, Toastmaster, and I'd like my fellow engineer here to feel comfortable from an HR persp-- _what are you doing?_  Why are you doing that?! Don't put that in the hole!" 

"It fell in by itself...I don't know what it is, as you've said..." Nijiko stops surrepititiously brushing dirt over the calculator with her sleeve and fishes it back out. "Anyway, if my braces need reinforcement..."

"Absolutely, your braces need reinforcement, that didn't mean--"

"--I don't waste materials. Or others' time."

"Excuse me? Even a glorified draftsman, not that I'm suggesting anything about--"

"Wow, right?" says Akio, clapping twice. "Great points all around. I'm so glad we hashed this out. Mediation. Two hundred years? Two hundred years?"

"My braces don't need reinforcement," Nijiko says. 

Her braces need reinforcement. It's unfair that her civilian textbook, so-called, has the answer Nijiko wants and denies, more and more stonily, as Ran asks. It would be all over if the civilians knew. She can't believe her own teammates don't realize how alarming the situation is, how different this state of affairs is from everything they were told to expect about what civilians know. But in the treehouse, as though the arrival of the civilians has done a diuretic number on the relevant neurotransmitters, they talk more to one another than they have for the past four months. 

"I think they are just about as happy as a clam enthusiastically experiencing its dying throes in the water under the bridge," says Gengoro, who is trying to acclimatize himself to what he describes as the vogue civilian lingo.  

"I'm uncomfortable with how convinced they are of their own importance," says Ryo. "Not that they are not important, but their fixation on personal agency and free will..."

"Incredibly problematic," agrees Ayu. "And at least three of them have asked me about conditioner, but not one of them has offered me waste products for my vegetable garden in return? Don't they have manners?" 

"Haru said he thought I was an angel," whispers Koruri, near tears. " _Does he know they're not real?_ "

Ango has been saving his update for last and finally explodes, unable to take it anymore. 

"Nijiko," he shouts, "made a  _friend_!" 

They turn as one to stare at her. The fire sputters insipidly and ineffectually, which is the manner in which everything does anything in the future. 

Nijiko crosses her arms. "I don't know what I could have done to deserve such unwarranted abuse."

"Just...see that it doesn't happen again..." says Gengoro, looking skeptical. 

The twigs crack neatly between them in the silence, very loud, like ice cubes in a glass. 

"I'm sure Nijiko was cooperating for everyone's benefit," says Ryo in a smooth redirection. Defending her automatically for something as useless as this; it's not new--she just knows now that it's not as though he knows why she does anything either. 

"Don't," says Nijiko.

"What?" 

"Just don't."

She's irritated, for one reason or another. She thinks of Ryo putting his hand over her head, the preservative fluid closing over it, something she couldn't actually have felt. It bothers her that she still hasn't weaned herself of these things and still orbits in this tense proximity, watchful and hoping for some vestige of the old comforts. She understands she's exchanged the teachers' impositions for the long-learned habits of her own body's, but she doesn't have a choice.

Drop her a kilometer from this camp and this firelit circle of people even the civilians see as only awkward, miserable children, and the probability is still high that she wouldn't make it back to safety on her own.

"Don't sleep here tonight," says Ayu, when she gets back to the room. "You're ruining my peace of mind with your negativity."

"I don't have negativity."

"See for yourself, if you want. My hair is positively curling at the ends."

She doesn't want to see, so she says, "Where do you want me to sleep?"

"Go to the outside room."

"Ango and Ryo are out there."

They both still, on either side of the curtain, and are galvanized into motion again for having to pretend they didn't notice. 

She takes her vague irritation and her trainers out to the frame of the extension hut, sets up her sleeping bag there, and stretches for her usual night suicides. When she gets back, wrung out as she wants, there's a sharp braceleting of her wrist and she's wrenched around. Ran's gaze is flaying in the fires, further away, downwind from where they're building the hut. 

"Why are _you_ here?" she says. "Were you going to do something without me?"

She peels Ran's fingers off one by one. "I need to sleep," she says, very patiently she thinks. "Are you on a watch duty. Don't talk to me."

"I heard you leaving the treehouse. I thought something might be wrong, the braces--"

Nijiko gets her arm free and shakes her hair out of her eyes. "Don't say anything about my braces. I don't want to fix--" She does, though. She wants to fix it. She doubles up, a cracking pain shooting up her sternum. She must have not stretched properly; she's been failing at these elementary things. Little things. Ran steps away, but not back. " _Get away from me_."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not." She shoves her impractical hair out of her face and leans to Nijiko's level. Her eyes are clear as amber, all magmatic layers, slow-moving, the sense of some powerful, muscled thing with teeth fossilized deep below. They hurt to look at straight-on.

Nijiko puts her hand over her face. "I want to be--" she deserves to be, she doesn't know if she can be "--alone."

High above them, the wind threads through the barest branches of the denuded tree once, twice; Ran drops her hand. 

"Fair. I'm sitting here, pretend I'm not. That shouldn't be hard for you." Does she know about the test? She couldn't. Nijiko has told no one, and there's no judgment in the tone, only that warm, hard gaze, of a clear and mirrored density. "Tire yourself out, and then we'll both go back inside. We've got work tomorrow."

Nijiko drops like a bag of parts at her side of the hut, flat on her back. She opens her mouth to breathe from her stomach.

In the past, the sky was a ruddy industrial orange that obscured the stars and irritated them all when they did their navigation charts; now it looks exactly like the completed diagrams. The future is a perfect, finished building: no people to ruin it. 

Without looking, she can tell that Ran is still there. "I'm going up." 

"Oh, take as much time as you need, if it's taxi--" The mocking cadence drops out of her voice as quickly as it fell into it. The ice-chip stars tremble very nervously above Nijiko's head. "Sorry. I didn't mean it. I--this isn't new to me, I've got no right to behave like this towards you."

"What isn't new," says Nijiko, "exactly. Nothing is stopping you from doing your civilian--writing your book for people who'll do whatever you want, or talking to Ted...what have you."

Ran's head appears in her field of vision, silhouetted against the stars. "You remembered about the book?" 

"It's for people who understand seventeen years of...architecture, of civilian architecture, and none of you think we're anything more than machines--"

"It's not for people who  _anything--_ " She bites her lip suddenly, her attention turned sharply inward. "What--what did you say?"

"I built machines. I know what you think of us. They don't. But when I know something, I'm usually right. You all treat us like tools who can do two or three useful things, but you don't think we can learn anything on our own. You think we can't--"

"I've never thought you  _can't_. Only that you  _won't...._ " She trails off. Nijiko pushes herself to her elbows and Ran reaches a hand out absently to brush the dirt off her sleeve, then pulls it back, hesitant. "If you want to borrow the book instead of having me show you, I've offered five times, Nijiko-san. You don't need  _me_  to fix your braces if that's what you want."

"I don't want anything." It takes her a moment to realize the somnambulist mumbling is her own voice. "Nobody tells us why we need to do any of...it's the same wherever we go. I'm bored of it. I thought the curtain would be enough for--I'm a good designer, why won't things just work the way I designed them. Buildings would be better if no one lived in them."

"Right, that's not how the social contract works," says Ran, not unkindly, almost experimentally. She's smiling. "It's a  _room,_ not a ventilated box. It's for people."

"What's the social contract."

"You are  _definitely_ asking the wrong person."

"Then why are you smiling?"

"I--who knows?" She shutters her eyes, thumb over her lip. "I guess I'll take it if you're asking." 

The dirt is cool on Nijiko's bare elbows, the exhaustion like a hard stone in her throat, redbrown in its pulse and beat, the tall, cool ceiling of the night, the uncontained part of the future that has nothing to do with her treehouse and the people in it. She lies back down and puts the crown of her head against the earth. In a few weeks, she thinks, there will be boards over this part of the ground, and the room will look different. 

I am not the only one who knows how it will look.

"Go," she says again. "I'll go up when they're asleep."

"Do you have a night watch duty?"

"I did, now it's not--how would you know?"

Ran gets up.

"It had to be a door," she says. "When I got here. I couldn't face a curtain."

Before she leaves, she says, very low, "We've done this before, Nijiko-san. You can ask for the book, it's not like Autumn's--what I'm saying is." She pulls her hair back, pensive. She has the look of someone who has slipped a calculation and now goes back in half-dread, waiting to come upon the error. "You can count on help."

_Help--water--_

What a stupid thing to tell someone.

"This isn't help, it has to be done. It's work."

"Sure." Her voice is like wire, cored hard, but malleable. "But it's not your job." 

The next morning Ran isn't at the site, an irritant Nijiko flattens to a dull embarrassment for the rest of the day, working hard alone, breaking for lunch, returning to the treehouse near twilight to Ango's shamefaced look and Ayu's nod in the direction of her backpack. "Something for you. The architect dropped it off." When she unbuttons the flap, the book falls into her hand. 

She opens it. The first parchment drawing is of the extension hut, with several lines of handwritten text explaining brace reinforcement.

She turns the pages. The text is different from the reference she had at school, but that's not the major change. For page upon page, in cramped lettering it must have taken hours to keep neat, are annotations, footnotes, highlights, strikeouts, calculations, words she doesn't understand struck out, defined, rephrased. Seventeen years' worth of architectural knowledge distilled and reinterpreted, as though she'd asked, though she didn't. With this it can be done alone.

She slaps the book shut, foolishly startled by the spike of gratitude. She opens it again, with caution. 

On the flyleaf, in a self-mocking, extravagant hand, it says:

SHISHIGAKI DESK REFERENCE  
(For people who won't)

 

 

 

 

 

**7.**

 

 

 

 

 

Ran gives Nijiko two red and blue drafting pens, half a pad of waterlogged but otherwise pristine graph paper, four claw clips Nijiko uses as drafting anchors, the calculator to take apart, a multitool screwdriver, an easel tripod built beautifully out of cedarwood cut flimsily as balsa, a set of inane-looking civilian shoes for water survey which are called crocs and bear no resemblance to crocodiles, a twenty-minute lecture at Nijiko's flat refusal to wear them anywhere, an only slightly smug shorter one when she catches a cold inconclusively proven related to said refusal, and a peace-offering threadbare sweatshirt that says TODAI ARTS and is too large in the chest. She waits until she sees Nijiko using, storing, assessing, wearing any of these things before offering the next, and in the course of this steady, encroaching cacheing Nijiko feels herself grow steadily more situated into the life Ran left behind, the surprise she remembers of being admitted into another's space and gazing about at the paraphernalia of the full interior life with mild astonishment: so this is what they needed. This is what they have, that enables them to do what I don't. 

She's made her peace with the imposition to live where others do: die on your own, survive in the structured suffocation of architecture, those are the choices. There isn't a third choice. But one week she isn't able to read the computerized differential output on the calculator and the next she is, can mark it on the graph paper Ran handed over in anticipation. Ran imagines things of her she can't yet conceptualize. 

She supposes the stones of the riverbank must feel like this, picked up, turned over minutely by the tide, returned to within centimeters of their original position. It's manageable enough cartography, and Ran is steady enough in it until--

"How come she didn't come to the river today," she says. "Something bad happened?"

Akio gives her a cautious look. "Kind...of?"

Nijiko thinks about it. "Because the basin calculations were off and we waterlogged our springloading mechanism."

"Also Hana-san died and we exiled some members of our team yesterday," she offers, a moment or two later.

"That...that's the one, yeah, you got it."

"I didn't know she was attached to Ango and Ryo." Akio stares at her while she sits down against the wall and opens her canteen. "Do you need some water? Some civilians are dehydrated in the wake of these events." 

"No, you know what, Nijiko-san, I'm good. But thanks for offering."

"Can I have some of yours, then?"

"...What?"

"Can I have some of your water?"

"No, you cannot, are you serious? You have your own water."

"It was worth a try," she mumbles, "well...I'm going to sit here and wait for her." 

"In our room?"

"I've been in worse conditions, though not considerably." She blinks politely at him. He swears a bit and goes back to fixing ropes. Ayu had rounded up all the civilians a few weeks ago and instituted a scheme where she and Ryo blew darts at them when she saw anyone's hands idle; they expected some kind of protest but everyone treated it as a charming game after Ryo was taken aside and forced to file the poison tips off his darts. Civilian double standards aren't worth parsing and go well with Ayu's propensity for making labyrinthine distinctions about everything. Then again, maybe this is the way to do it. Anyone who can't distinguish between a poisoned dart and...

The extension hut really is terrible; it's no wonder the civilians never want to spend any time in it. She wonders why she thinks it's terrible. She didn't have any problem when she helped build it and in fact thought it had too many features, including "doors that opened from the inside" and "windows." "Where's Ran-san anyway. She shouldn't waste my time."

"Well, we're all sorry about that, princess," mutters Akio, then looks dismayed and bites the end off his rope with miserable finality. "What with all these deaths and exiles, your time is definitely our greatest concern."

"It's  _Ran-san_ 's, I know you don't care who I am." He squints at her the way Ryo did when he was five and she tripped him on the way to Mayu's protein shake station. "No, it's fine, I reciprocate fully." 

They work silently for eleven minutes. The sunset washes milkily against the unfinished walls. In the Shinohara chapter on submersion hydraulics, Ran has scribbled "For ref. centroid of a complex container y-sub-r equals sigma F times Y, all-over f-sub-r, feel free to use my calculator to sub in your coefficients" and then two dots and a sideways open bracket. This is a smile, technical notation. Nijiko turns it sideways to look at it. Akio is staring at her over the top. 

"Look," he starts wildly, "you suddenly--why are you doing this? Is this some kind of thing where now that Hana's gone, you're going to give her this lecture about the impermanence of life and how she shouldn't waste time in grief but you just want her to get back to work, because you know that living up to her potential is the only way to make herself feel better, and you definitely don't care but you just can't stand to see her skills go to waste--I'm just spitballing. Stop me when I'm right. One of those things where you admire her but that doesn't translate to personal interest, because your judgment is completely objective, and has nothing to do with anything as relative as your own strong feelings of personal preference--" 

"I like her." 

"Really?"

She stopped listening a few clauses in. "Why wouldn't I? She knows water, and space...different kinds of work."

"Is that so."

"She's just naive. She says I don't have to do any of it because it's not my job."

A concentrated feeling flashes across Akio's face, it's like crumpled paper, words that were probably once clear and whose existence is only apparent, now, in the unfolding. It's gone again in an instant; still she experiences the momentary surprise she has felt, since childhood, at the sense of others' lives revealed to her like this. Rooms larger on the inside. "She said that?"

"I don't think she thought I'd stay."

After a few moments Akio unscrews his Nalgene, pours some water into its attached top, and slides it over. Nijiko puts her book away so it doesn't get wet. 

"It was good advice," she tells him coolly. "Someone could have told Ryo killing people isn't his job. Or even anyone's job." She pauses. "It's pretty stupid."

Akio puts his forehead in his hands. After a few moments more, he takes the pipe out of his mouth and says, "Oh, fuck it. This is too weird. Do you...you know what a joint is?" 

"Ran-san, she has this very big, very VERY big," Nijiko finds herself explaining an hour or two later, or maybe seven hours, making a round circle in front of her Todai sweatshirt to indicate the pocket; Akio covers his eyes, "--compendium of referential engineering principles, that's...is my hand really far away from it?"

"Far away from what?" Akio is walking to each wall of the room and touching it with his palm, it's the most amazing thing Nijiko has ever seen. She wants to do it. She throws her notebook at him reasoning that this will help. No, she thinks about throwing it. That's close...mind over matter, Ran says. 

"My...face." He starts giggling. She giggles too. She gestures for the pipe back and he hands it over while looking at her with consternation, unsurprising as he seems to be under the impression she is actually the window frame behind herself, which he slings his arm over.

"Whoa...you laughed."

"We aren't robots..." He strokes the window frame quizzically, mouthing the word 'robots' in a silent, conspicuous rosary. "What? Even if my classmates...I know about computers. I love floppy disks."

"Floppy disks?"   

She falls asleep there, like that, and Akio is still dozing when someone bangs the door of the extension hut open. She checks her temples and her wrists right away, no adverse effects; she's a little dizzy. Not yet ready to go out into the sunlight. The pleasant, lightheaded feeling she had in the hut is fading fast when Ayu looks past her, makes a noise of disgust, and manhandles her outside.

They don't talk at all as they go back to the treehouse, first minding the civilians, and then Gengoro and Ban, moving around the treehouse in an attempt to distract themselves from--to distract themselves. Ayu doesn't talk to her until they're back in the room, and then she slams the door, shaking the entire treehouse. 

"It's a hoisted structure, use common sense," says Nijiko.

"Your new book didn't help you fix the issue?" so she knows it's about the civilians, and in particular about Ran. She just knows. 

The curtain shivers between the two of them like a membrane. She remembers what Ran said:  _when I got here, I couldn't face them._ She's been facing this girl since birth, all of them since birth, she thinks it shouldn't be hard for her at all but Ayu is angry with her, it's impossible to predict why, and this, more than anything else, is the proof that things are different. That they've become such different people they can no longer understand one another. 

Now, of all times, it shouldn't surprise her. 

"You sound like Ango."

"Don't compare me to him, Nijiko. Don't _ever_ say his name again. Move on."

"You're the one who is angry," she says. "I think that means you're the one who isn't moving on."

Ayu is shuddering behind the curtain. She should stop. 

But then she thinks of Ran, of Akio, the things they've given her casually, they've told her, and quite suddenly, without any warning at all that she could house such a sentiment, she's angry too. Ayu only ever tried to give her the one thing, the towel doll when they were children, and even then it had seemed like too much of an imposition. It should be easiest with her, not with the civilians. It shouldn't be easier with strangers than it should be with those you've known since they weren't yet themselves. It shouldn't  _exhaust_ her and she is angry with herself, also, for being exhausted. She's been tired from the moment she heard Ryo's raised voice and known, just by the tone of it, that he'd made a wire of whatever taut words he was saying, something for her to wrap around her fingers and slice him with finality out of her life.  

"You're the same as you've always been," she says, slowly. "You need me. You can't admit it, but you do, and I don't know why, but I'm part of your world here. And you hate that. I don't think of myself as particularly good at anything, but I'm not a hypocrite, Ayu. I don't know what you want me to do for you."

"Do you know what you want to do for  _them_?" 

"They don't want anything from me."

"You want something from  _them_!" she's shouting. "You were  _furious_ at the rest of us when they said things about your treehouse, you were disappointed in Ryo, you were upset by the test, you're like the rest of us and I wish you'd stop avoiding what's right in front of you and _admit_ you need something! That's the only way we're going to get past this!"

"There's nothing to get past," she says, sitting upright, and then Ayu tears open the curtain, launches herself across Nijiko's bedroll, and snatches her backpack. In a few moments she's found the book, Ran's desk reference. She has her water bottle in her hand, shaking fingers. Her eyes are bright with tears.

"Ayu," says Nijiko. "Don't--"

"He kissed me," says Ayu. Her thin, pressed-shut mouth, her wide, furious eyes. "People have always done things like that to me. That dead civilian girl, she--it could have happened to me, and none of you would have done anything."

Her mind has gone blank.

We only ever wanted to trust we would keep each other alive, she says to someone in the past, she doesn't know who. Her teachers, Ryo, Ayu. Herself, maybe, the self that was told, again and again, conclusively, that it had survived because she had done nothing. We only wanted to do that, and now it's upon us, this question you made us ask. If we'd have done what we did at the test to each other. If we already did.

"I wanted something from you because you believed in luck," says Ayu. "You never believed in what they said, since we were children. You never believed we deserved everything we got. I thought you might be different."

"I--" 

"Taka-san, Hana, they've told me about luck. Now. After years. And Ran-san, she's told _you._  But--" she draws a hand over her eyes; she sounds so small, now, a girl trying so hard to apportion space fairly, and then she says, "why was it easy with  _them._ Why was it hard with each other."    

She reaches back for that old belief of her childhood. You stumbled upon water, you found it, it was given to you. You didn't earn it. It was worth extending yourself to assist someone else because you would need them, too, in the future, there was no tension between efficiency and compassion, you could have both. You would have both, in the future.

She wants, so badly, to believe that again. 

"What are we if we don't deserve it," she hears herself saying. "What are we if we didn't deserve to pass that test." 

"You know she didn't deserve it," says Ayu, "and neither did I," and then she dashes the book with the water, soaking it through in seconds. Ran's words all lost, the last proof anyone had given her that she could find her way out, that she might ask for help and that might not be a violation of the rules of the universe she has moved within, been a law of physics within, since she was only a child who did not know what she was for. She puts her hand up in front of her eyes, not sure if she's going to charge at Ayu or simply sit back down, succumb to her exhaustion and go back to sleep, She doesn't know if she's wrong, but she knows Ayu is right.

And then they both hear it. There's a commotion in the front room, Gengoro cajoling. Someone saying, "Koruri--" 

 

 

 

 

 

**8.**

 

 

 

 

 

By the time they get outside Koruri has seen them. She stares, starts, breaks into a run. They look at each other for a moment, confused. Then they chase her down the steps of the treehouse. They're close enough to see that something is wrong with her, some kind of leg injury, a twisted ankle maybe, and that supercedes everything. Whites out everything they want to say to each other. They make it halfway across the bridge and then Nijiko tilts her chin at Ayu, who grabs the side of the bridge immediately. For one moment, she looks at Nijiko, as if to challenge her, whether what she made will hold. Then she swings herself over and drops to the ground, telescoping herself into a neat crouch.

Koruri makes it another few feet. Then she collapses. Nijiko runs, ducks, gets under her, and drags her arm around her shoulders. Koruri is furiously strong and she's sure she won't make it, but then--there. On the other side, Ayu's arm supporting them both. 

"We're not fighting anymore," she says, clearly. "You don't have to run away from us."

She's too sullen to talk to them, to look at them. They take her up the stairs and bundle her back into the treehouse. They build up the brazier, elevate her leg, use ice. They make a quick gruel for dinner without speaking to one another, or without looking at one another once. They let her cry herself to sleep once, then twice. They go down to the civilians in shifts, first to ask someone to fish the glider out of the water, and then to talk to Haru, who confirms what they'd thought: she'd considered leaving. Not seriously, they know, for the same reason they know exactly why she considered it. 

In the middle of the night Nijiko wakes up and knows, without knowing how she can say, that all three of them are awake. It's like the capsules. That sense of being completely suspended in some suffocating, life-giving fluid. She looks up and sees the pale glow of the moon through the slats of the room she built, and then: violet on the curtain, reinstated in its place dividing the two halves of the room.  

It's quiet there, listening to their breathing. Koruri was wet when she came back and they're sleeping with towels under their necks, rasping against the floor.

"I wouldn't have gotten very far," Koruri says. 

"You'd have missed the routine," says Ayu. "You wouldn't have been able to fall asleep." 

"Some of them--" the civilians, she guesses-- "say we should forget about all of it. That that's the only way."

"It's not the only way," Nijiko says.

Ayu is listening, she knows. 

"I have asked for their help," she says, careful, as through dropping stones into a undisturbed reservoir, attempting carefully to raise the water level. "Ran-san--she believes in luck. It's different, to be helped by someone like that."

"Taka-san suggests leaving," says Ayu. 

"That's what they're like. They want to leave because they think in...blueprints."

Hope, she means. The future, she means. She hasn't said words like that since she was a child.

"But they don't necessarily understand everything--we did for each other," she says. "Or we didn't do. I don't think we need to forget that."

There's silence in the room, only the curtain moving, whispering across the floor. There are two fewer people in the treehouse today, two fewer in Nijiko's life, but two more in her room. 

"What do they know anyway," says Ayu. "They're civilians."

Koruri sighs. Nijiko stretches her palms down across the floor, the boards, the space. Ayu is humming something, thinking, all bound up in the thoughts that seem thicketed around them, her clear voice a scythe which resolves itself into the Dvorak. 

It's difficult to listen to, but there's something in the difficulty of it. Difficult because it is part of her history. Claustrophobia and intimacy, the texture of what she now understands she will always understand as her history. Her bright double at the academy, Ryo's single with its glittering and lovely window through which she'd looked out at what she hoped to be the rest of her life. The capsule where she'd spent most of her own century, the deadbolt room with its curtain, the extension hut. Nijiko has always treated sharing a room like handling burst water canisters in her backpack, disappointing, proof of the inherent futility of preparing for anything, source of a near-inexhaustible wellspring of minor irritations and the ruination of all her clothes, but she understands now that she will always build with the option in mind. 

The song ends. They let it resonate, unwilling to say anything to interrupt the charge in the quiet.

Ayu says: "I might leave."

That old sense of extending information without blame or forgiveness. So much has been done to them that she thinks they will always be washing up against the contours of it, rendering anything like reconciliation impossible. Still, she begins to consider its dimensions, its direction. The cautious optimism of its blueprint. She doesn't yet know how to build anything like that, but she has, in the past weeks, become accustomed to the idea that she is not the only one who might know how it will look. She doesn't think they will ever return back to that old place, but she also never thought it might work the way it does in Ran's textbooks, the civilians' plans. Who would? It seems impossible: coming back to somewhere  _new._

The future is impossible. 

Nijiko drags her hands across the floorboards, her sheets, up her lap, the rest of her pulled in the same upward motion. When she crosses to one side of the room to take down the curtain it falls at the other side as well, almost in the same instant. She looks across the room to Ayu's face, cool, considering in the open air. She looks at Ayu across the space of the room.  

One way to reclaim the space taken from you is to expand the space you have. 

"If you do," she says, "you'll need this."

She takes the towel down from around her shoulders, ties it into a loose knot, and tosses it to Ayu. And there it is, again, unchanged, completely changed, a smile from their childhood, before anything had happened. 

The weight of years rises up around her, dense as liquid, and she fights for a moment the old urge to go under. Then she envisions water flowing away downhill, never constrained, past the civilians and the future, the test, her childhood, the old room. Water receding revealing empty spaces, unexpected architectures beneath. Somewhere new to build. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the end


End file.
